Llanor Alleyne
Writer | Editor | Artist
I bought Marlon James’ second novel, The Book of Night Women this past summer intending to read it immediately. I made it through the first chapter, which grabbed me by the throat with its straightforward and graphic reflection on bloody childbirth and, perhaps relieved to be released from such a painful beginning, I set the book down, eyed it intermittently and made excuses (i.e. read other books) before committing to reading it this week. Last night, near one a.m., I read the final sentence, closed the book, and inhaled and exhaled deeply for the first time in several hours.
What James does with Night Women is what every writer worthy of besotting devotion is capable of doing: taking a familiar narrative and dismantling it so thoroughly that the reader can’t tell sky from ocean, complicating character allegiances with depth and a complexity that is in tune with the reality many of us read books to escape from in the first place. Without question The Book of Night Women is graphically and verbally brutal, an unavoidable consequence of its subject matter: slavery in Jamaica at the dawn of the 19th century. Written in a patois that is best grasped if initially read out loud to establish cadence, Night Women follows a 13-year old, green-eyed slave girl, Lilith, from her bloody entrance into the world into a womanhood she is constantly trying to define and hold on to. Amid the vulgarity of this particularly vile strain of West Indian slavery (the gibbet, hanging honey coated slaves in the hot sun, slow roasting slave burnings that defy humanity), is a group of black women, several of them sisters via the overseer, led by the aptly named Homer, who intends to bring freedom to Montpelier Estate’s slaves and exact revenge on its owners. Key to Homer’s plans is Lilith, who is impetuous, arrogant, hardheaded, and vain (she loves her own green eyes with an intensity Narcissus might be jealous of)–qualities Homer thinks can be best used for murderous intent.
Night Women‘s slave narrative is best experienced if the reader is able to put aside 21st century sensibilities and hackneyed representations of slave life. By all accounts, Lilith is a house slave, and James plays, up to a point, to type with that well-known hierarchy. But Lilith is also a girl and her childish assessments and desires have very adult consequences. I struggled with liking Lilith from cover to cover of this book, and some of her actions go violently against what many of us hope we would have the courage to do were we slaves. Her eventual lover is a hard pill to swallow, but I appreciate that James goes there and never allows us to look away; never gives us the option of reducing the sexual and emotional relationship to simple dualities, like “master and slave”.
James also wounds some firmly held myths about heroes and villains native to the genre. His characterizations of the Jamaican Maroons, for example, shatter a worshipful reverie that history has polished for centuries. Not everyone running for the hills were welcomed by the hills. And, while the slave master Massa Humphrey is as morally corrupt as one would expect, James’ brush strokes give him depth and dimension.
I’m guilty like everyone else of mentioning Marlon James’ name in the same breath as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, two writers he has admitted to having influenced his writing. Some of the language betrays these influences, but his choice to write Night Women in patois was a stroke of genius that completely transplants the reader to the Montpelier Estate, to the heat and oppression of 1800 Jamaica, to the conflicted, dark heart of a green-eyed slave girl whose life song is squarely set to the beat of survival.
A must read.
Thanks for putting me on to this book. If it weren’t for this post, I would have never heard about it.
I must get a copy. I love historical fiction.
my next trip to Barnes and Nobel will have to include this book! There is just something about a well written book. You’re love for the written word comes through in your passion for the literature you describe and the words with which you describe it!
Definitely worth your time. I doubt you will be able to put it down once you get into it.